How different was Eisenhower to Sanders in terms of budgeting and taxes?

in tax •  3 years ago 

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When you fact check Bernie Sanders' statement that the tax rates on the rich were higher under Eisenhower than what he's proposing, everything indicates that Sanders' statement was true.

If we were using politically (social) correct language and being honest, we should view the statement as "missing context."

Yes, the rates were remarkably high. No, there wasn't a massive spike in revenue nor was there a drop in revenue after the rates were cut. Even if there were, it's important to take motivation into consideration along with other factors.

Eisenhower favored balanced budgets to tax cuts. We still had something resembling a gold standard. There wasn't as much of a delusion at the time that we could spend all we want and just keep spending money. Just to start with the differences between somebody like Eisenhower and people like Bernie and AOC is that Eisenhower's motivation was to balance the budget and not to use tax rates as a means to create more income equality; nor was the motivation to expand government power.

We know that Bernie and "The Squad" aren't motivated by balancing the budget. Bernie's new policy proposal, according to the Wall Street Journal, would be North of five trillion dollars and that's with us already spending at a massive deficit. AOC is a vocal supporter of the cult of Modern Monetary Theory which maintains that a government that prints its own currency will never default (ya know, because Greece doesn't exist); so, balancing the budget isn't even on her radar.

The only thing that I can find that Eisenhower had in common with Sanders and The Squad economically is high tax rates on the rich and being wrong about that policy.

In basic economics, the word "optimal" is used a lot.

Philosophically I believe that the only correct tax rate is 0% for everyone; but, while we have the mass murder machines that we call "government" stealing our money, we need to talk about what's "optimal."

Almost every big spending politician seems to want to live under the impression that, if we got a trillion dollars out of the 1% by taxing them 50% we'll get 1.9 trillion dollars by taxing them 90%. The data don't show that. Revenue has been largely flat in both income and capital gains taxes for the last century regardless of the rates. There's an optimal rate to be charged at which the time, effort, and cost of creatively avoiding the tax is more expensive than simply paying it.

Eisenhower is much more different than Sanders than he is similar on economics. The media are good at hiding this fact. They love to say that Eisenhower showed us that we can be prosperous with high taxes on the rich. Relatively, yes, he did. But, did the high taxes help our prosperity or hurt it? We're we prosperous because of the high taxes or despite them?

There are more data to support the latter.

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